Suchergebnisse

A review essay on a book edited by Arthur J. Vidich, The New Middle Classes: Life Styles, Status Claims, and Political Orientations (New York: New York U Press, 1995). An anthology of essays written 1926-1992 (some previously published) provides a historical sociology of the rise of the middle classes (Mcs) in Weimar Germany & the post-WWII US. Included are essays by Arthur Vidich, Val Burris, Anthony Giddens, Hans Speier, C. Wright Mills, Joseph Bensman, Michael Hughey, & Arthur Evans. Particular theoretical emphasis is placed on the salaried white-collar worker as a crucial dimension of the global political economy. The texts on the Weimar Republic were substantively written during its formation, & the essays in the following section, devoted to the postwar Mcs in the US, address many of the issues raised in the earlier pieces. Collectively, these writings provide a model for exploring themes in the contemporary global political economy. D. M. Smith

We model the effect of competing political campaigns on the opinion of voters who exhibit correlation neglect, i.e., fail to understand that different campaigns might be correlated. We show that political campaigners can manipulate voters' beliefs even when voters understand the informativeness of each campaign separately. The optimal coordination of campaigns involves negative correlation of good news and sometimes full positive correlation of bad news. We show that competition in targeted campaigns has the effect of changing the opinions of different groups in different ways; competition increases polarisation among extreme voters but at the same time increases the variance and the quality of moderates' voting decisions.